Head, Cytokine and Cancer Signalling Group

After completing his PhD in the field of Pharmaceutical Science from Goethe University (Frankfurt Germany), Dr Moritz Eissmann led postdoctoral research at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research (WEHI) from 2012 to 2014, and at the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute (ONJCRI) since 2015.

Today, Dr Eissmann is Head of the Cytokine and Cancer Signalling Group at ONJCRI. His research utilises novel cancer models to understand mechanisms of communication between immune cells and cancer cells to help improve immunotherapy treatments for advanced gastric and colorectal cancer patients. Dr Eissmann is a Victorian Cancer Agency (Mid-Career) Fellow and recipient of the AACR-Debbie’s Dream Foundation’s Gastric Cancer Research Award.

His research discovered the tumour-promoting role of cytokine IL33 in gastric cancer (Nat Com 2019), and his team has developed new gastric cancer models, which enable testing of novel immunotherapies against gastric cancer.

Dr Eissmann’s team continues to establish novel cancer models, including cancer organoids, and employs those models to investigate the role of IL33/ST2 as well as IL6/IL11/STAT3 signalling in shaping the tumour microenvironment. They study their impact on cancer progression, metastasis formation and (immune) therapy responses.